


Beyond the Latticed Gates

by aban_asaara



Series: Month of Fanfiction 2017 [3]
Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Mentions of Rape, Mother-Son Relationship, Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-03
Updated: 2017-08-03
Packaged: 2019-10-05 01:28:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17315507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aban_asaara/pseuds/aban_asaara
Summary: Leto is good at many things, but lying isn’t one of them. There is more to the strange ritual he brings up one day, his mother knows.





	Beyond the Latticed Gates

**Author's Note:**

> Month of Fanfiction - Day 3 - Family. Just a whole lot of headcanon about Fenris and his mother!

Twelve years, yet the language of the Imperium still fits all wrong in her mouth. In her anger it’s her mother tongue that comes to her, one of several that the jungle has begotten like so many shoots springing out of the forest floor. But her daughter has never learned it; her son has forgotten most of it. She herself hasn’t spoken it in years.

Her tongue gropes for the drawn-out vowels of the mainland. “What is this ritual?”

Leto is good at many things, but lying isn’t one of them. “I’m not sure,” he confesses, staring down at his toes, “but it should allow even a soporatus like me to channel Fade magic. To some extent, anyway.”

She sighs. He knows more but he won’t tell her. “So you don’t even know what it does, but you will fight for it?”

“I don’t care what it does. I only care about getting you and Varania out of here. This place—it will kill you someday.”

“Something will kill me someday.”

His jaw clenches. “It’s not—what I mean.”

He means that she makes a poor slave. She forgets how many beatings she’s taken just for looking at the masters the wrong way—but she can decipher the many tongues spoken in the hush of the Seheron jungle and she knows her plants and her poisons better than the apprentices studying them in their tower long into the night. As long as Dominus has her children she will not slip deathroot into his wine, and he knows it. “You think I will leave this place with you in it?”

“You could return to Seheron. Take Varania there.”

For all she knows her village is gone, and she can’t thrust Varania into a land torn to shreds, home or not. “I’m not going back to Seheron,” she replies, and as she speaks the words she knows them to be the truth. She will never see the island again.

Leto sighs. “The point is that you could go anywhere. Orlais, maybe? The magisters hate it, so it can’t be that bad,” he quips.

“But _you_ would still be here.” She tries to imagine herself in Orlais while her only son is still in chains in the Imperium. The idea is absurd. “It’s not right.”

“Mother,” he says, and clutches her shoulders, tilting his head down to meet her eyes. _When did he get so tall?_ “I’m not asking for your permission.”

She should be the one in that pit on the morrow, fighting for her children’s freedom, but there is too much pain in her body now, and the bones of her spear hand never mended properly after Dominus used it to demonstrate a spell. “It is foolish. You should stay with your sister. Look after her when I’m gone.”

“I can’t just leave my post. You know it. She will never be safe here.”

She looks at Varania lying prone on her cot, too still to be sleeping. Her hair is spilled around her head, pillowed on one pipestem arm. It looks almost black in the stifling Minrathous night, though it burns bright as flames in the sun. It’s a curse in this land, hair like this. Every head turns in Varania’s wake to stare at the flame-bright plait running down her white nape. Just barely on the cusp of womanhood, and apprentices and masters alike already want to pluck her flower, yank it out like a weed.

Mothers all pride themselves in having the most beautiful children in the land, but she’s seen how Dominus fixes Leto when he spars with the other guards, how the teacher’s hands linger on Varania’s body to correct her form when she practices spells. She wishes her children had been homely. She wishes they could have grown up the way she did, with tousled hair and mud on their cheeks and palms raw from climbing up trees, never having to cry about more than a spider bite or a sprained ankle.

But the children of slaves don’t grow up. One day they realise how unkind the world is, and some door forever locks behind them. It makes for a lot of tiny adults, she’s found. She still remembers the day it happened to Leto, when a boy he confessed to kissing once died at the whipping post for stealing a tangerine.

She dreads the day her daughter will come back to her with the light in her eyes stamped out. There isn’t one thing in this world she wouldn’t give up to spare her that fate.

Except—

“Leto,” she breathes, and she only realises that she’s weeping when he pulls her against himself.

“I’ll be fine, Mother. Maybe—maybe I won’t be chosen, and we’ll stay together. But I have to try.” He pulls back to look at her. “It’s the first time I’ve even had the choice to do anything. I have to take that chance. You understand that, right?”

Of course she does. She used to dream of freedom. She used to imagine herself sneaking past the guards, one of her children under each arm, slitting the throats of every slave-hunter on the way back to her home village. But her dreams were beaten—and raped and tortured—out of her while she waited for an opportunity that never came, until she forgot what even lies beyond the latticed gates of the estate.

She wipes the tears off her face, takes a deep breath to loosen her throat again. “Can’t I change your mind?”

His eyes are soft when he looks at her, every bit as handsome and kind and strong as his father, and what good did that do _him_? “No, Mother. I have to do this.”

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hello on [Tumblr](https://aban-asaara.tumblr.com/)!


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